An Android smartphone is about the only thing you’ll need to manage your life and work when you’re on the move. It can accomplish any task you throw at it: you can listen to music, watch movies, surf the Web, edit documents, connect your laptop to the Internet using tethering and much, much more.
Of course, there are a lot of things that an Android smartphone can’t do. Hardware intensive tasks like video editing, working with huge 20 megapixels photos from professional digital cameras simply won’t work on most phones (except the newest and most powerful ones), but if the issue is only software related, then you can be sure that there is an app (or will be in the near future) that can do what you need.
There are over 50,000 apps on Android’s marketplace, and all of them are great quality, as they’re checked thoroughly before being posted. Here are just a few of the apps that you simply must install as soon as you get your phone to maximize the amount of things you can do with it.
Titanium Backup. It is pretty much impossible to have a phone crash that would delete your data (especially from the SD card), but having backups of your files is never a bad thing. Titanium Backup is the premier backup app for Android, and you can use it to back up anything from the files on your memory to the phone’s system files. This can be very useful in situations when, for example, you lose your phone or have just bought a new one and don’t want to set up everything manually.
Tasker. Tasker is a pretty neat and useful app that lets you automate your phone and create various actions and profiles that would activate and deactivate automatically at any time you specify. For example, you can set your phone to switch to silent mode when you enter your workplace, set it to remind you to buy groceries when you’re near a store, sync files when you get home, and much more. The app uses the phone’s sensors and GPS in order to know what to do and when.
Winamp. You might already know about Winamp, the best music player for Windows (it also plays videos, but it started and is still the best for audio). Well, Nullsoft has finally released a version for Android, as well! This is great news for all music lovers, and the app doesn’t disappoint: it can do so much more than the default one, it’s pretty amazing. You can sort your songs and files by artist, album, name and other factors, create playlists, search by keyword, find lyrics, control the player from the lock screen, and even sync the files with your desktop copy of Winamp. And, in the best traditions of Winamp, it’s completely free!
Rock Player. Android’s basic video playing capabilities aren’t going to impress anyone. If you want to watch any AVI, WMV or other video files without having to spend an hour converting them on your desktop first, you’ll need a third party video player with its own codecs. Rock Player seems to be the best in the category, and it can play much more formats than the nearest competitor. It can use hardware acceleration and the controls are simple and intuitive, which is also nice. You just can’t go wrong with Rock Player if you want to watch movies, music videos or any other video files.
ThinkFree Mobile. ThinkFree Mobile is simply the best mobile office app for Android. It has everything you might need, can open most of the popular file formats, including Docx, Xls, Pdf, Ppt and Apple’s custom documents, and it can sync and work directly with your Google Docs account. Compared to Quick Office or Documents to Go, the latest version is also much faster, which can only be a good thing.
Be sure to check out the above apps when you get the chance, they can really help you extend your smartphone’s possibilities, and you can find them very useful at times. There are also many more similar apps on the market, just open the app and search away!
